The party has today launched its new transport programme, Fast Track Britain: Building a Transport System for the 21st Century, promising to “significantly increase long-term rail investment, introduce road user pricing to tackle pollution and congestion and hand control of buses back to local authorities have been launched today by the Liberal Democrats.”

You can find the full news release on the Lib Dem website here, and the full document is available in PDF format here.

There’s a raft of proposals – building a high speed rail network; introducing rolling contracts for train operating companies to increase long-term investment and improve services; giving power to control local bus services back to local authorities; and introducing a new fund for rural transport – but there’s no doubt what will attract most attention… The BBC website gives a clue:Clegg unveils road charging plan

(The full details of the Lib Dem proposals for road pricing are copied below.)

Party policy has generally been in favour of road pricing – though we’ve been a bit quiet about it in the past couple of years – with most concerns centring on the privacy issues of the state collecting data on citizens’ movements.

Personally, I’ve never seen the problem (with reasonable safeguards in place). It is one thing to have to carry an ID card simply to prove to the state you exist – that’s bad; but quite another to enjoy the privilege of using a less-congested road system. The fact remains that the market is the most efficient – and certainly most effective – way of pricing road use according to the value we place upon it.

But that’s my view: what’s yours? Choose now in our new Lib Dem Voice poll asking: Do you support Lib Dem plans to introduce road pricing in return for the abolition of vehicle excise duty and cutting fuel duty?

You know the drill: simple yes / no / don’t know options are located in the right-hand column. (And of course feel free – I know you will – to use the comments thread to pick apart the question).

Motorway and Trunk Road Pricing
2.4.11 Liberal Democrats propose a motorway and trunk road pricing scheme covering all motorways and major trunk roads in Britain.
2.4.12 During our first parliament we would undertake preparatory work:
– Detailed consultation on the design of the scheme, including levels of charging and data privacy issues.
– Invest significantly in public transport through our Future Transport Fund.
2.4.13 The key aspects of our proposal are:
– Road pricing should be seen as part of a package of measures – it is not a solution on its own.
– To tax differently, not more. Our scheme will be revenue neutral for the average motorist, with the revenue from road pricing used to remove VED entirely and reduce fuel duty.
– Significant investment would be injected into public transport prior to introducing any charging, providing a viable alternative to the private motor vehicle, where possible.
– Pricing would be linked to car emissions, benefiting lower emission vehicles.
– A ‘Privacy Guarantee’ would be provided to motorists, by separating any personal details held from journey details. This would include the option of using an anonymous pre-pay system and would establish robust legal guidelines around the use of data collected (i.e. data would not be passed on to other organisations).
– Exemptions and discounts would be introduced for emergency vehicles, NHS vehicles, public transport vehicles, and vehicles used by disabled drivers who rely on their car for transport (following the disability exemptions for VED).
– We would make a firm commitment to provide political leadership in tackling emissions from the transport sector.
2.4.15 A number of locations have already implemented forms of road pricing including London, Stockholm and Singapore, and the Netherlands are currently considering a national scheme.
2.4.16 The benefits we would expect to see include:
– Fairer charges for using roads according to the polluting effect of each vehicle.
– Financial benefits for drivers who have no public transport alternatives and are dependent on the car (particularly in rural areas).
– An increase in the certainty of journey times (vital for the freight and services sectors) due to an incidental reduction in congestion levels.
– A commensurate improvement in viable public transport alternatives to the car.
2.4.17 We envisage that our motorway and trunk road user charging scheme would operate using the ‘tag and beacon’ scheme, covering motorways and trunk roads. To avoid a plague of ‘rat running’, the technology chosen must allow for penalties to be enforced on drivers who ‘rat run’ in order to avoid payment.

143 Comments

To the extent that if I had found out this policy before drunkenly allowing my fiance to talk me into joining the party I would have told him where he could stick his tenner. It is not, and never can be, Liberal to track and monitor every road user all the time, and furthermore it would be horrendously expensive to implement. We already have a pay as you drive system in place, it’s called petrol tax. If you drive at peak hours and get stuck in jams, you use more petrol and pay more. If you drive a car with a bigger engine, you use more petrol and pay more. It’s perfect.

Why in Cthulhu’s name are the Lib Dems, of all people, proposing an expensive, centralised, bureacrat’s wet dream of a policy like this?

The problem with road pricing is that it is not as good as fuel duty in encouraging fuel efficient driving. It is possible to vary the road charging by the car’s nominal mpg. But that is still not as good as fuel tax as an incentive. Fuel tax works better than road pricing for cutting global warming because it gives you a financial incentive to:

1) get your car serviced regularly
2) pump up your tyres
3) change up at lower speeds than you might otherwise (to 5th at 26mph on the flat in my car)
4) accelerate downhill not uphill where possible
5) lose a few mph as you go uphill
6) Drive more slowly on the motorway
7) Glide forward when approaching junctions rather than driving and braking.

It is not possible to use tag and beacon road pricing to achieve any of these CO2 reducing items.

My car (1.8 petrol Mondeo) has a nominal combined mpg of 37.2. I drove to France recently and got 45mpg, because I drive with an eye to fuel economy (my record door to door is just over 48mpg, pretty good for a car of this size).

Congestion charging at particular times is a very good idea when there is congestion at particular times, and building more roads is inappropriate. That will include some of the motorway network at some times.

But we need to be aware – as the Eddington Report made clear – that road charging administered in a revenue neutral way will increase CO2 emissions (it also knocks net govt revenue, as quite a big chunk will go on admin). That is why its sensible application is relatively limited.

Road pricing/congestion charging is, of course, a form of LVT and, as such, will be welcomed by all Liberals as a thoroughly fair and non-distorting fiscal measure – especially as we are intent on REPLACING the eminently unfair VED, which penalises car ownership irrespective of actual usage. Pity that we seem intent on fiddling about with VED in the short term (subject to Conference amendments of course) while Road Pricing technology catches up, but hey – softly, softly catchee monkey!

Interesting, I could have swore the Lib Dem’s wanted to gain seats not lose them? The merest mention of road pricing in the more rural territories that Lib Dem’s hold will mean they choose to not stay gold for much longer.

The congestion charge (which is what I assume is referenced in london) is a joke that has not shown its worth yet, any rural area will (as they always do with good reason) claim this will be an attack on their liberties as such blanket centralised measures disproportionately impact them…worse still given these areas are more frequently not earning lower incomes.

It also completely fails to note that despite increased taxation road use is still at a huge height and not falling. When will politicians realise that before you go about showing the stick to people about car use, you need to whip the public transport industry in to shape? Why should people use a train when it is only marginally cheaper, majorly more hastle, generally longer and almost certainly less reliable than using a car? Without these issues being addressed first and foremost all that these taxes will be is just that…taxes, revenue building systems.

If that’s what Lib Dem’s want to do come out and say it, don’t hide behind the green schtick that is fast wearing thin.

Lee, a lot of the folks on here are Greater London based. They HAVE good public transport, and don’t get what it’s like to live somewhere that doesn’t. Hell, we have good public transport in West Yorkshire compared to a lot of places. A lot of places that, as you say, are currently yellow on the map… Where’s Adrian Sanders when you need him?

Jennie, I’d tinker with the proposal, but in essence it is a half-way house between two equally undesirable polar opposites.

Describing the proposal as necessarily expensive, centralised or complicated is a failure of imagination.

By connecting existing mobile telephony technology (and the associated payment systems) with satellite navigation systems already placed in large numbers of cars we have already effectively created the ability to implement road-charging on a wider scale than we propose.

By making loud noises about the limited extent of our proposals we can push to ensure Labour and Conservatives lose any initiative to call for a blanket roll-out on all roads by distinguishing between dual-carriageway routes and the universal service roads we each live on and upon which ought to have our right to travel freely guaranteed.

This is something which is too important to fudge or allow to be replaced by local ‘congestion charges’.

I think another by-product of such a plan would be the increased emphasis on planning long-term transport systems around which regional development can grow with more certainty.

Of course it will be controversial, but it is an argument which we need to win to prevent the inevitable organisational messes that a politicised plan would entail.

It is equally important to highlight how by doing it our way we will make transport both freer and fairer.

It’s true that petrol tax is a quite good way to tax the burning of petrol, but it’s not ideal. It doesn’t take into account the efficiency of the engine burning the petrol, and it doesn’t take into account the need for the journey; it hits someone out in the country who needs to travel to buy food as hard as someone in the suburbs driving into town when there are perfectly good buses every 20 minutes. Road pricing could, potentially, help with both of these to some extent.

Also, we needn’t fear intrusion from technological tracking as long as the controls on the use of the data are kept strong. Under a Lib Dem government, they would be. If anyone else tried to implement the scheme without such controls we would be free to oppose it.

Orangepan, it’s a line in the sand for me, I am afraid. Tracking every road user all the time they are on the road is not, and cannot be, Liberal by my definition of the word. I don’t really give a toss about the practicalities of it: tracking people is not Liberal. Full stop.

Why the assumption that Road Pricing automatically equates with Big Brother? No one makes such a claim when they use a toll road, despite the fact that they are almost certainly being captured on CCTV as they pass through the toll point. Sure the technology may be more advanced, but it doesn’t have to be intrusive or sinister. Vehicle tracking is NOT an automatic consequence – and the “toll” goes into the public purse rather than private pockets.

Collecting a fair “rent” for your temporal and monopolistic occupation of a valuable piece of tarmac is what this is about – and REPLACING unjust taxes in the process. As with LVT, marginal areas (i.e. quiet rural roads) could and should be exempted. The argument that this would just create “rat runs” doesn’t hold, since as soon as traffic volumes increased, a charge would apply.

By the way, Congestion Charging was operational in Durham before London.

Jennie, I agree that tracking isn’t slightly or entirely liberal, but the fact is we already do it in many ways.

Do you use cellular mobile technology? Do you use plastic money? Do you ever go into chain stores? Do you ever use computers?

Um, I’m afraid to worry you but tracking potential is universal and ubiquitous – it would be far better that we defined the acceptable limits for it than ignored the reality to the extent that we let it control us.

Jennie – fuel duty is better than VED, no question. But it doesn’t discriminate over WHERE you burn the fuel, so does little to alleviate congestion. It also penalises rural users who may have to travel further to access essential services. Fuel duty subsidies for rural users are open to abuse and just add complexity. Better to have a straightforward scheme based on the “value” ascribed by traffic usage (i.e. the market) to all roads – and automatically exempting those least travelled. AND NO TRACKING!

Andrew: how would you do that without tracking? Because tracking is my only problem with road pricing, it’s just that I don’t see how it can feasibly be done without it. The other alternative is huggins of toll booths, which would be fine by me, although they’d be expensive to build, but I suspect most road users would baulk…

“under a Lib Dem government, they would be. If anyone else tried to implement the scheme without such controls we would be free to oppose it.”

Jesus christ. That’s really all I have to say in response to that asinine quote. Jesus. Fucking. Christ.

“No one makes such a claim when they use a toll road, despite the fact that they are almost certainly being captured on CCTV as they pass through the toll point.”

The problem with this policy is two fold.

First, it’s not whether it is a big brother policy or not, it’s whether it can be perceived as one. As it happens road drivers, with their sat navs telling them where all the myriads of speed camera’s are and (as you point out) CCTV cam’s watching over them, are some of the most flinchy when it comes to the idea of being watched while they drive. If there is anyone you don’t want to give any kind of suggestion to regarding tracking their driving and get a response that isn’t about how they don’t appreciate being spied on then it is your typical driver.

So what if the system is secure, you can argue it til the cows go home, peoples perceptions on this are simply not going to change under the current climate, not for a long while.

The second issue is one of what the policy is actually aiming to do. If you’re talking about saving the environment then fuel tax is the only way to go as it’s a direct indicator of how much CO2 is released in to the world. Someone here hillariously claimed already that fuel tax isn’t fair on those with inefficient vehicles, but that’s kind of the point of what ultimately sounds in part to be an environmental tax.

However if you’re also trying to say that it would be cheaper to drive in the rural areas, and to drive where there isn’t public transport, is to completely ignore any environmental factor in the policy.

If you are trying to help the environment you have to tax everyone based on fuel, if you want to stop congestion and needless car use then you go for road pricing, right? WRONG. You could invest all that bloody money in tracking cars and collating data and managing it in to PUBLIC TRANSPORT to provide the bleeding incentive for people to move away from cars in the first place! Implementing transport systems where there are none, subsidising public transport travel more, etc.

The lib dem’s have such a good standing when it comes to bigging up public transport yet *this* is the announcement they make on their transport strategy for the future? Major, major dropping of the ball, sorry.

BTW, let me put some perspective in here. I’m from Bristol currently, by the way, hi. We currently have the slowest commuter speed in the country I believe, slower than London. We’ve had several initiatives such as single days of awareness encouraging car sharing once a year to encourage congestion reduction but that’s not done much. Are we as a society really social enough to share a space such as the inside of a car readily? Seems not. While this was happening, local bus monopoly, First, put up their prices by something in the realm of 40% in two years. Student prices have currently risen to the degree of almost 150% in the last 6 years, for example.

There were plans for a tram system or similar but they were dropped because government funding was withdrawn. Apparently a functioning public transport system is just not a priority for funding.

Most of this happened under a Lib Dem council in case you’re interested, but now we’re under Labour. Since they came in we’ve seen more “advancements” such as the pushing through of a congestion charge system for Bristol, multiple attempts at trying to make swathes of the city require parking permits to park outside their house, and the latest was to turn part of the glorious Bristol to Bath *cycle path* in to a bus route with perennial arse tickler of the council, First Bus.

This is the sort of thing politicians are doing with regards to transport, trying to charge road users more and more for their use while stripping truly environmental measures away to make the path for big business easier and only really forking out investment for schemes that can bring money back in rather than actually change anything for the positive; and it’s the sort of thing that this policy fits right alongside in the wealth of poor and misguided ideas that really aren’t engaging with the public…unless of course you can get the BBC to do their usual hatchet job on policy announcement and get them to concentrate on how “Lib Dem’s will cut fuel tax and VED” as if that’s the end of the story 😉

You’re right – perception is everything and we have to be able to sell the benefits of this. The key is being clear over which hated taxes we intend replacing (which is why I’d rather we didn’t fiddle around with VED in the interim), and ensuring that tracking isn’t an automatic consequence. I think the best way around that would be a pre-payment system which simply deducted credit on a Pay-As-You-Drive basis and wouldn’t necessarily be linked to a particular vehicle. In other words, you would purchase a card from a retailer, slot it into the appropriate holder on the inside of your windscreen and pay as the roadside scanners read the barcode. The only way of tracking a particular individual would be if they were foolish enough to make the original purchase with plastic rather than good old cash – or barter of course.

Say I go and buy a card, pre-pay in my local corner shop for example. There is nothing tying me personally to the card and nothing trying the card to my car. I go past a load of scanners…(and this is assuming that there are scanners on every single road, or is congestion/pollution not worth worrying about on C and B roads?)…and it somehow works out that I have gone 10 miles since the last scan in some amazing wireless/satellite communications system that I have never heard of let alone dreamt of. Of course there could be a scanner on every single possible turning or diversion on a road, in which case a small local communication would be needed between linked scanners.

Once it’s done all this calculating of my distance travelled and what not, it needs to work out if I’m allowed to keep driving. Now sure, the card could communicate to the scanner, and some central system could be told that card #A13224213JJJ is now driving without any credit left. What does the system now do? Make the scanners flash a scary red light on top of it every time I go past? Tell the police that an unknown driver in an unknown car is driving without appropriate funds somewhere in the vicinity of this scanner, if you’re lucky enough to be able to stop every car and check their card reference number?

Let’s get real for a second, the only way that a road pricing scheme could ever work is via satellite communication between a registered vehicle and a data centre, or by annual/bi-annual audits of a top of the range route recorder. There are no other ways that a system could work cost-effectively and without breaking down every 5 minutes, and certainly no other way therefore (aside from the toll booth on every street that Jennie said) removing driver details from such a system

Let me pre-empt an insane idea. No, you cannot have a device that controls whether or not your car will actually run dependant of charge on your card. Aside from safety implications of running out of money in the middle of Dartmoor, any system which doesn’t have some kind of centralised security is more open than anything else to being circumvented by even the most haphazard of technical boffins.

When you are on a stranger’s doorstep next time and they are complaining about the state of their roads and pavements and you know full well that the available budget will cover a minute proportion of the real investment needed and you’re humming and hahing and making vague promises about trying to get a bloke down with a wheelbarrow load of chippings think about what you could do with this:

(I note it’s not responding at the moment but I hope it comes back – try later – it’s a fascinating look at how road pricing could be used to allow various levels of road – from s43 to motorways – to be properly maintained and make a profit for its owners, us).

Also, if Tom Papworth’s blog is back up (http://liberalpolemic.blogspot.com/), he did a very good piece in December last year I think about why roads are not a public good at all.

Mutualise the lot. Roads are little different from bandwidth, and the latter will probably become just as important in our lives in the coming years, yet we don’t squeal at having to pay for our use of that.

I vote yes, with some caveats – roads should be made to pay for themselves. Rail can already pay for itself through recovery of land values. Air travel needs to pay for our airspace it uses similarly by publicly auctioning landing slots. Fuel taxes cannot go completely as people have pointed out, but there’s a balance and transparency issue – a way both to reduce reliance on less environmentally efficient transport and to pay for the infrastructure what’s left needs to run on without it having to compete with the local social serv ices budget or whatever.

But overall, LVT on the ground beneath our feet will reduce travel distances by making more efficient use of the built space we use – people may pay more in fuela nd road use in rural locations but less in LVT and vv – people in towns will pay less per passenger mile because they do fewer miles but more for the land they use….

I dont drive but frankly the public transport where i live (not even ‘out in the sticks’) is so bad I can see why people do….if you overtax people without *first* improving public transport then people will simply pay the tax and feel aggrived that they have too…..i dont support this proposal therefore at this stage….

The first line of defence (ignorance) has been breached and we are forced to build a new levee (legislation). Once the flood has been stemmed, then we can dig the cross-dykes (gradual tightening of regulations) to get the continual data seepage under control.

Here’s some more perspective, trying to show why pushing people on to the current train network that is simply “more reliable” and with comfier seats is a losing game…

I want to go to Liverpool to see my girlfriend’s family. I get a taxi to the train station for £6 or I get two buses for £3.60, if they turn up at all. I have to get a train after work so the buses are less regular. I’d choose to take a taxi simply to ensure I get my train. Travel time is 20 minutes to the station.

Timed right I get straight on to my train which has cost me £60 return by booking a month in advance. I roll in to Liverpool and either need to get picked up (cheating), or take a taxi to get to relatives house. This is another £5. All in all the journey will have taken me at least 4 hours including journeys too and from the station while costing me in the region of £70

By contrast a car journey from my house to the destination door to door would take no more than 3 hours each way even with mild congestion on the motorways, it would be able to be done when I want to leave each location, and for (currently) about £50-60 depending on congestion.

This policy states nothing that would alleviate this situation, other than to potentially push that journey’s charge up in the car slightly on balance. Is that the way the Lib Dem’s really want to try to continue the increase of rail travel?

There don’t seem to be many people in this discussion, so I’ll throw in my tuppence worth.

I think these are excellent, ambitious plans. The technical side is fascinating and (forgive the phrase) we should have clear civil liberties ‘red lines’ on how it is developed. But it strikes me as do-able.

My unscientific guess is that the best analogue of the technology is the humble mileometer. Cars need some basic technology to read what the price is of the road they are on (achievable in more ways than one) and they then just need to mutliply by mileage and fuel consumption to generate a number that is broadcast from time to time – frankly, it need not even be that frequent. Let no one who wanders the world with a mobile phone say we’re on fundamentally new ground here.

In the unlikely event we’re talking about the central computer knowing the minute-by-minute whereabouts of every car in the country, I agree that is unacceptable and probably unfeasible anyway.

Is the idea worthwhile? I think so. Tim makes some interesting points which merit investigation, but this uniquely deals with (crude) fuel consumption, congestion and the extent of alternatives on offer. Before Yorkshire gets too wound up about all this being a London conspiracy, I’d suggest turning to Shetland where they’re about to pay £1.50 for a litre of unleaded – and more of it tax than anywhere else in the country. Journeys are often quite long, and buses few and far between (if any).

We will need to make the case for these proposals, but at least they are built on good far-sighted liberal principles. When small rural communities see the alternatives which the two tory parties would settle for (as they do right now) I don’t think the job of selling these plans is that hard at all.

This is a really really stupid idea as well as being downright offensive. It involves tracking where everybody travels – another advance on labour’s move to Orwellian surveillance. At a time when people are making it very clear that they are sick of an all pervading state it should be dropped.

Road pricing is a device to introduce satellite surveillance of motor vehicles; nothing more, nothing less. Those (in Washington) who are foisting it on us couldn’t give a fig about environmental protection. They want to watch us and control us wherever we go. Only the feeble-minded and servile can support this. Let’s leave it to the robot radicals of the Green Party to advocate statist, Big Brother solutions. We are a LIBERAL Party. Let’s prove it, Nick.

Did Labour not float this idea a couple of years back and we went balistic calling it another form Big Brother and that it would cost millions?
I for one would like to see the costings, prove to me that this will 1) save money 2)save the environment 3)will totally re-shape public transport in EVERY part of the country
Then I may be convinced, otherwise I think we have handed the tories yet another un-costed and ill thought out policy to beat us with!

I realise this policy is not itself just about road maintenance but it needs to cover that too I think.

So to follow Big Mak asking for figures, there’s something that I’ve always been uncertain of…

I know we don’t hypothecate taxes to roads (though if they are not, strictly speaking, a public good then we ought to) but does anyone know whether what we actually collect from road users in all forms, whether from VED, RFL, fuel taxes etc is greater or less than what is spent on roads?

Remember that still, a third of households basically never use the roads under their own steam for they have no access to a car – so if they use the roads it’s through a public transport provider.

The most obvious plus point for this, if we already collect more than is spent would be to reduce what we collect to what is needed to maintain the network properly, then the headline cost to the user would be less, and zilch for the non-user, and THEN, use fuel tax, albeit at a much lower rate, to moderate the overall demand. No?

I just don’t buy all the arguments about Big Brother. We’re talking about building a system here. We can build it to be as intrusive or not as we please. And I for one can see how it can be done without even passing data of where you have been to anyone. If a device in the vehicle does all the calculating of how much any journey costs and then the billing system only collects that, and not details of your journey, auditing your “device” could be part of the MOT to ensure it’s not tampered with.

If a device in the vehicle does all the calculating of how much any journey costs and then the billing system only collects that, and not details of your journey

… then how is it checked? I can see a Lib Dem government advocating your position, to be honest, but unless the Lib Dem government is in forever, it won’t last. The next government will announce a crackdown on cheats, and we won’t be able to object because the technology will already be there….

Jennie, I don’t see how that is different from virtually any other function that collects useage data – your bank account, telephones, broadband, anything really. Why are these any less open to abuse by a future government? Or are road users somehow more worthy of ‘future proofing” than users of any of these other data collection functions?

I suppose one difference at first sight might be that these are privatised, so maybe the answer is to ensure the government does not have the data in the first place by privatising it.

You could, for example, make it all happen through competing insurance companies – already the motor insurance market would like to use tracking data in order to tailor insurance costs to the times and places people use their vehicles. Let them also collect the road charging income and just pass alump sum to the government perhaps.

(as and aside on a different issue very briefly, I just noticed that the Google ad that appeared beneath my last posting was for “Henley’s local choice – Get to know John Howell, the Conservative candidate for Henley” – given the exchange of letters about denying Steve and the Green candidate’s local credentials it might be worth flagging up!)

Jock, I don’t think it IS much different, but I don’t think those things are harmless. I fully understand that they are open to abuse by a future government, and, indeed, the current one is trying it’s damnedest with it’s horrendous database scheme which it wants to attach to ID cards.

Like I said to Orange above “Things are already bad, hurrah! Let’s make them worse!” is never going to be a convincing argument as far as I am concerned.

So, my question still remains Jennie, why are road users any more worthy of protection that these other data collecting activities, and why the heck shouldn’t they pay for what they use, like users of these other services? Because they might, one day, have their data ripped off and used by a future nefarious government? Great. Let’s start a policy to ban databases, full stop.

I do still want to know, however, whether overall drivers currently pay more in all the various taxes than the road system costs or whether the rest of us are paying for it too. That’s a bit like forcing me to pay for your bandwidth isn’t it? Why is that fair? Paying for what we use, whether public or private, is better if it is possible than the “collective punishment” of making us all pay for it regardless of how much we use it.

What I don’t understand with road pricing is how it deters in a smart way.

The London congestion charge, whatever criticisms are made of it, is simple and clear. Go in this area at this time and you pay.

When I hear discussions of road pricing people talk about charges based on congestion, the type of road and the time of day. That sounds like a complex pricing structure which makes it hard for people to work out if changing their behaviour saves them money.

There is a danger with such a model that it ends up like telecoms deregulation where the pricing structures are so opaque that people just stick with what they know and pay the bill

Road users aren’t more worthy of protection, but I can’t go back in time and stop the other things being created. Like I keep saying, just because some bad things already exist, creating more of them is not justified.

AFAIK, road tax is not ringfenced, and thus goes into the general pool, but the last statistic I heard is that roughly a tenth of what is collected actually gets spent on the road network. So road users are paying for you.

Of course, if the state made a profit from Road Pricing (as Jock correctly asserts it should) and cut VED and fuel duty accordingly, public transport could be one massive beneficiary. If you were determined to avoid even the remotest possibility of being tracked (whether BB was operating out of Langley or Cheltenham), just get on the bus/train/bike/shanks’s pony. And wear a hat of course.

Jock: on almost all measures, road users (as a whole) pay far more than the cost of using the road, including environmental costs and anti-social costs (deaths, etc). This is more true as time goes on, as cars anti-social costs decline (deaths per km falling, NOX etc emissions down). Motorised road transport is the only form of transport that pays its way. Pedestrians and cyclists don’t pay, buses and trains are subsidised, and aviation is not close.

Obviously there will be some roads that do not pay their way, either because they are on very expensive real estate, or because they inflict particularly high externalities (environmental, or death traps) or because so few people use them that they cost more to repair than they generate in tax.

Last time I did the maths, the Stern value on the global warming contribution of a litre of fuel was 8p, given govt 42p of duty left over to pay for the roads and other externalities. (plus VAT).

The privacy issues have been well covered here but not the fact that road pricing will actually cause more congestion and pollution. The advocates of this policy do not appear to have read it properly. The proposal is not to charge for all roads which are congestion blackspots. The proposal is only to charge for using motorways and trunk roads. The effect of charging will be to move traffic off of the motorways and onto smaller roads, through residential areas, towns and villages, which will cause more pollution in the places where people actually have to live. These journeys will be slower and take longer causing more fossil fuel to be consumed. More night freight would pass through these towns and villages to keep costs down by avoiding charging but increasing noise pollution.

The London based policy groups are actually proposing to move traffic off the M1 and divert onto non-trunk roads that pass through towns like Chesterfield. This is the sort of policy that Sir Humphrey would describe as “courageous”.

“I’d suggest turning to Shetland where they’re about to pay £1.50 for a litre of unleaded – and more of it tax than anywhere else in the country. Journeys are often quite long, and buses few and far between (if any).”

But this is where once again this policy shows it doesn’t know where it’s heading. If the policy is about not charging people for use of vehicles that they “can’t avoid” then sure, go ahead…but don’t kid yourself that you can do it while also being a green party.

“We will need to make the case for these proposals, but at least they are built on good far-sighted liberal principles.”

There is a very limited amount of sight in these policy proposals, unless you’re talking about high speed train services that benefit..um…very few?

“When small rural communities see the alternatives which the two tory parties would settle for (as they do right now) I don’t think the job of selling these plans is that hard at all.”

Then you clearly don’t know rural folk.

“If you were determined to avoid even the remotest possibility of being tracked (whether BB was operating out of Langley or Cheltenham), just get on the bus/train/bike/shanks’s pony. And wear a hat of course.”

So it’s essentially now a liberal position to say we should be happy to limit someones accessibility to certain things unless they’re willing to be tracked? Are you serious?

I’d join with Mak and say I’d love to see some costings. The whole of the policy document is full of ideas that seem to be no more than that. And combine the fact that the biggest idea for helping people out of their cars is road charging with the fact that they only mention lowering train fares once (and then it’s in passing) you can see just how little insight the party has made in to how they’re really going to deal with the issue of public transport. Instead they say that they want local authorities to deal with local transport? To try and claim without any kind of detail that such a “plan” is a solution is to ignore how ineffectual councils (including Lib Dem run ones) are when it comes to dealing with frequently monopolistic transport companies.

Al: You’re spot on and it’s something I mentioned last night in my blog. High road charge costs on trunk roads will mean people burn more fuel on smaller less free flowing roads with more stops, while also travelling through areas with more pedestrians, more cyclists and probably less well maintained roads. This is not to mention the increased safety issue of more junctions and sharp corners that are where most accidents occur on the roads.

But then if you charge too much in fuel tax then people will try to take the most fuel efficient and fastest route.

There is, quite frankly, little that can be done to fine tune a real balance between the two, the party needs to decide if its priority is the environment or congestion…given that it’s boxed itself in to a corner by announcing these policies before detailing anything to do with improving national public transport.

This is a GOVERNMENT idea, which Nick Clegg has rather foolishly indicated that he supports (he still has time to see sense and back off). The Lib Dem transport team didn’t think it up. I first remember the idea being floated by Blunkett as a means of controlling traffic speed (Big Brother cuts off the fuel supply to one’s engine). No doubt you will be defending micro-chipping of the population when it comes along. Honest people have nothing to fear from the (US) government scanning our brains.

Here’s how you do road pricing without tracking individual car journeys:

Along the roads you want to charge for, set up a transmitter every mile (say). This transmitter sends a signal to every car going past, telling it the price of this bit of road. (This can vary in time, so a road might be expensive at rush hour, cheap or even free at off-peak times.)

Fit every car with a reciever system that logs these price signals. This will record how much the keeper has to pay for the roads that the car has driven on, but NOT the identities of the roads themselves. For example, a record might say “20 miles on roads priced at £2 per mile, 30 miles on roads priced and £1 per mile”, but NOT “M6 from J12 to J18 on 14 July”.

On a regular basis, the receiver system connects to whichever government department system is dealing with this, and generates a bill which is sent to the keeper. (Or the keeper pays by direct debit, or whatever.)

Just like insurance and MOT certificates, the keeper has to prove that their bills are up to date before being issued with a road license for the car. The road charging effectively replaces the current vehicle licensing charge, but the rest of the licensing and enforcement system remains in place – fines for using the road without a license, and so on.

So road user have to pay for the bits of road they use, but their vehicles movements are not monitored.

– To avoid rat-running on non-charged roads, every single road in the country has to have these transmitters, otherwise you just push traffic off the trunk roads onto minor roads. I fail to see how this is practical and affordable.
– Then you still have a problem (under your system) of not being able to differentiate between a local resident using the road (which presumably should be lower), and someone that is rat-running through to avoid the presumably higher cost of the trunk road.

– I don’t really have a problem with the principle of road charging, but as liberals we should be looking to the simple, non-intrusive, non-bueracratic system if at all possible. As far as environmental damage (CO2 emissions etc) is concerned that option is available – it’s fuel duty.

Lennon: The lib dem plan is not (purposefully) to road charge every road, only major A roads and motorways. The aim is specifically to force people off of the major roads on to less safe and less fuel efficient roads while profiting from those that have no choice but to use the faster routes.

a, I have read the policy and when I wrote “I support with caveats” it means just that – I support road charging in principle – it is land that attracts economic rent that ought to be collected – which as policy goes back to Ricardo, Smith, Lloyd George and Asquith – not that I support the whole of these proposals.

I’m with those who say it ought to apply to every road, not merely A roads and motorways for a start.

It’s NOT a “government” idea. Road charging was around 200 years ago and has continued uninterrupted in other countries. It is a valid and liberal thing to want to do – pay for things through user fees rather than general taxes and so on.

Tim, thanks for your info about the amounts of tax etc – though I have to say I have seen the direct opposite asserted too (especially when you consider just how much of a backlog of maintenance there is – I realise not everyone can get a road laid like a billiards table and kept that way year in year out but it must be *the* biggest moan on the doorstep in any election (regardless of whether the body being elected can actually do anything about it!). So I would be saying there then that if you don’t treat roads as public goods and make them pay for themselves as they should then any road pricing policy should be sold as reducing the cost of using the roads while targetting that cost only at the users. That seems right and fair, but it doesn’t of course address the environmental costs and for that I still think you need fuel duty, but perhaps at the rates Stern refers to.

This either has to be about “keeping the nation moving” or it’s about deliberately attempting to drive (!) them off the roads.

There are too many things going on at once here I fear.

You don’t need ransmitters on every road. You can still use GPS, just that the receiver in the vehicle does not transmit data about where it is, just collects data about how much it costs to be where it is and tots it up.

The technology exists to enable GPS to make “intelligent” deicison about where to drive based on cost and congestion too.

Minor roads should pay for themselves, but that should be down to those with the biggest interest in them – rat running can be catered for – if you enter a road and drive straight through you get charged at a different rate than if you enter a road and stop.

Seriously, it’s a long document, but do go look at the link I posted yesterday – it does appear to be up now:

Almost everything that has been objected to on this thread is covered there except with the caution that that is about ensuring quality roads, not saving the environment. I don’t think they should be conflated personally.

…and Jennie, I still cannot fathom your objection to this one type of data. I am a liberal, and can see many options for doing this without even handing data to anyone other than an audit as part of your MOT or whatever, and even if it did, that could be done outside of government because we should own the roads mutually anyway. You’re probably on thousands of databases that could be “mined” by a future government. I can see ways in which road pricing can be done without your journeys *ever* actually appearing on database in a way that could be mined.

Why is it *bad* that a back keeps your data – after all you may want to refer to a payment made a year ago. Same with telcos and itemized billing. More data ought to mean better informed decision making and more power to the consumer to say “hey, that’s wrong I didn’t do/buy that, give me my money back”. You write as if all databases are a “bad thing” we just have to accept because they already exist but can resist this one.

I do think this might turn out to be one of those not very well rounded policies that is not sold very well, nor the liberal principles behind it explained because it tries to do too much at once, and that *is* an electoral liability. But I’ve come to expect half hearted attempts at radicalism from all parties.

I’m not against road charging in principle, I just have severe doubts that it can be done without storing immense amounts of personal data, without huge infrastructural cost, and without creating a political conflict against environmental and safety concerns. It also doesn’t seem very liberal given that it intends to build upon things like the lorry tax which surely any liberally minded person would ask why it is we’re penalising people that *need* to use the roads? Of course they talk in the document about moving from road and air freight to train and water, but where are the details? There is no fleshing out of how the Lib Dem’s intend to dismantle the haulage industry while taxing them even more, for example.

I think it’s not quite as well rounded as you believe it to be Jock, the complete lack of any real policy on sustainable public transport improvement and affordability changes means that it cannot be well rounded. But you’re definitely right that it is unlikely to be sold well.

Lee, how does “I do think this might turn out to be one of those not very well rounded policies that is not sold very well, nor the liberal principles behind it explained because it tries to do too much at once, and that *is* an electoral liability. But I’ve come to expect half hearted attempts at radicalism from all parties” make you think I believe it to be a well rounded policy?

Anonymous (and others); detail, detail, detail. You cannot possibly believe that this, or any other, policy document can set out the technical parameters of a project when all it is really doing is saying “this sort of thing is what we want to do”.

Actually I think this, and many other of our policy documents at least (and probably other parties’ too) has too much detail for a policy document. All a policy document really ought to do is make the principled or business case and that is what needs to be sold to the electorate. Trying to second guess how a systems analyst would then break it down is worse than pointless to my mind as, as can be seen here, it confuses selling the what with explaining the how which sets up expectations that will almost never be met.

I don’t see why it needs lots of infrastructure (the GPS already exists and Norwich Union at least are already using something similar for insurance), but even if it did, my understanding from earlier discussions at conference and when I’ve heard Nick and Vince and Chris Huhne I think talk about this is that we have already ascertained from industry sources that it could be done efficiently through a private contractor bearing the costs.

In all honesty Nick has been the invisible man since he took over , and this is the first thing i have heard from him and I cant think of anything that would alienate voters more,Labour suggested something similar and the public protest was huge.

Tracking everywhere people go is not liberal its facist control. This is the main stumbling block to this as a Liberal Democrat policy.

To get round that , abolish Road tax , lower fuel tax , have a “car tax return” you’d have to declare how many miles any car(s) you own had done in a year (by reading the tach) and the type of car, this would allow a calculation of enviromental impact without infringing liberty that would take 30 mins a year to fill out.

Confirms that its excedingly unlikely the Lib dems will be elected if there going in this direction.
All the worse of Labours “White Men (fathers,drivers most of all) are the only acceptable target for both intense nannying, disenfranchisation and taxation, PC bile all the while selling out to big bussiness and the EU”.
No thanks.

If the Lib Dems want a popular plank try reforming the Drug War. Gordo wouldn’t listen to the Science and Davis is a myopic “sending out the message” popularist.

Anonymous (and others); detail, detail, detail. You cannot possibly believe that this, or any other, policy document can set out the technical parameters of a project when all it is really doing is saying “this sort of thing is what we want to do”.

Actually I think this, and many other of our policy documents at least (and probably other parties’ too) has too much detail for a policy document. All a policy document really ought to do is make the principled or business case and that is what needs to be sold to the electorate. Trying to second guess how a systems analyst would then break it down is worse than pointless to my mind as, as can be seen here, it confuses selling the what with explaining the how which sets up expectations that will almost never be met.

My problem has long been with us or any other party…what’s the beef?!
As in what’s it going to cost me, my family and everyone in the country?
Anyway (including me) can come up with an idea or policy, but until it can be costed and the infrastructure it would require thought out then its nothing more than just that…an idea.
However with the Tory press like a pack of wolves at the moment we seem hell bent on throwing them scraps of red meat like this.

I voted for Nick, I know & like Nick but as with our stance on the Euro constitution this seems to be a mistake.
Nothing that would be a disaster but as and when this comes up at conference they are going to do a hell of a lot to convince me to vote for it.

Others who may vote on its principle to the environment without digging deeper need to think if they want to spend at least another decade in the wilderness, I for one don’t. The Tories will use this and keep pushing on, I do sometimes think we have “speak before we think” syndrome!

“Actually I think this, and many other of our policy documents at least (and probably other parties’ too) has too much detail for a policy document.”

you’re probably right, but my problem is not the too much detail it’s that there is too much detail in one place while absolutely zero in another. If it was a document that was full of objectives then I’d be able to accept it a little better (while questioning it)…but all this talk of funding systems for high speed train lines make me very cautious about the complete lack of detail in other areas.

Is this because they only wanted to flesh out certain areas or because they really don’t have any real ideas on those aspects of the document that are little more than by-lines?

Ross:

“In all honesty Nick has been the invisible man since he took over , and this is the first thing i have heard from him and I cant think of anything that would alienate voters more,Labour suggested something similar and the public protest was huge.”

I’d hardly call greater coverage by the BBC than Kennedy ever got while sober as the traits of an “invisible man”

“To get round that , abolish Road tax , lower fuel tax , have a “car tax return” you’d have to declare how many miles any car(s) you own had done in a year (by reading the tach) and the type of car, this would allow a calculation of enviromental impact without infringing liberty that would take 30 mins a year to fill out.”

This really just wouldn’t work now would it? At least the tax man can follow a trail if they think you’re lying on your taxes.

It sounds a reasonable plan if it had not been for the cost of implementation.

Vehicle excise and road maintenance should be built into the fuel price.
If you use the roads – you should pay.
If you have a powerful/unecological car – you should pay.
Price petrol over diesel.
We achieved all the the goals and a fair deal.

On the negative side, the fuel cost rise will increase the cost of all consumer goods and we will have to pay a little extra whether we own an vehicle or not.
Well there maybe consessions for commercial fuel stations… There is a way
The main idea is not to build the system which may turn out ineffective inspite of the billions spent.

The way the Road Pricing policy has been prepared and announced is completely barmy and straight from good ‘ol Barmyland. Co2 emissions and other forms of pollution come from …. er….. petrol. So it’s petrol that should be taxed, and the income used as a form of taxation into the Consolidated Fund. Road pricing is designed to pay for…….ROADS ! To try and use road pricing to create disincentives for CO2 emissions, (eg lots of exemptions for the disabled, ambulances, and higher rates for cars with air con etc etc etc) just creates a huge complex bureaucracy. Road pricing to pay for roads and road usage/maintenance however is an excellent idea and works well in Singapore, Switzerland, and other relatively sensible places (administratively). This new Lib Dem policy – very general use of road pricing and lots of comlications – is the result of very heavy lobbying by the firms that produce and implement these technologies at vast (wildly inflated) expense. There have been lots of paid Westminster village lobbyists promoting road pricing for years, including…many of them in the Tory fold. Paul

Lee:
“This really just wouldn’t work now would it? At least the tax man can follow a trail if they think you’re lying on your taxes.”

If the tax man thought you where lying a visit to look at the miles on your car tacheograph would be sufficent. This could be done at random without suspicion by the police for every car they pull over any way. a small price to pay for not having a tracking device in the Car.

Lying would be a criminal offence in the same way as lying on any other tax return is.

I also think there is a distinct showing of illiberal thinking that is perhaps clouded by some city living here. Why is it necessarily wrong to own a powerful vehicle so much that they should pay more tax than anyone else? If people choose to take up a hobby or something that means needing to cart around huge equipment (sailing perhaps, or horse riding, whatever), why should they be penalised for the only choice they can make?

They’re already going to be taxed more because of fuel use, yet we also victimise them because of a sensible and appropriate choice of vehicle. Not every “powerful” car owner is a Chelsea mum, some lib dem’s seem to have lost sight of this.

The trouble is that this country needs a way for peoples personal carbon impact to be measured. I can’t really see a way of it’s happening without a database either, but at least then we would have a truly liberal system that lets even the most dirty and polluting drivers end up tax neutral because of other lifestyle choices that reduce their footprint. With any of these transport scheme’s it’s only half the issue, because the people that suffer most are those that have a definite need for using vehicles and/or people that are responsible to the environment yet don’t see a reduction in their taxes for it.

“If the tax man thought you where lying a visit to look at the miles on your car tacheograph would be sufficent. This could be done at random without suspicion by the police for every car they pull over any way. a small price to pay for not having a tracking device in the Car.”

It wouldn’t work because there is no proof that you racked up those miles on a public highway, and that’s before getting in to the issue of variable pricing per road type and (as the lib dem’s suggest) some roads being tax free to drive on!

Actual there is 1 case for road pricing in this country , and that is commercial HGV’s from the continent who currently contribute not a penny to our road system nor buy fuel here but still clog our roads sit at 60 in the middle lane have a very dangerous blind spot on the right of the cabin for pulling into said lane. Uk Lorrys often must pay tolls to use major roads on the continent so theres no quid pro quo at the moment.

If the objective is to take cars off the road making motoring more expensive and massively improving the regularity and quality of public transport as Nick seems to be suggesting, inevitably people with less money will be first on the Bus.

“It wouldn’t work because there is no proof that you racked up those miles on a public highway, and that’s before getting in to the issue of variable pricing per road type and (as the lib dem’s suggest) some roads being tax free to drive on!”

A car driven on a private road will have the same environmental impact as one driven on public roads. I would ignore where the miles where racked up and simply call it a “Motor Emmision & Road Tax” for semantics sake.

Yuri: “Vehicle excise and road maintenance should be built into the fuel price.
If you use the roads – you should pay.”

Don’t agree there. It ought to be separate regimes. Pay at point of use for the roads and if you want also to disincentivise CO2 emissions do something with fuel (personally I think that LVT on land and roads effectively would cause such a reduction in the need to travel anyway).

If you continue down the “consolidated fund” route it leaves Whitehall, Westminster and councils still in charge of how that money gets spent and where. If it goes straight to the “owner” of the road being used they have the funds to maintain it (and to decide whether to put more money into it – say a residential road wants to turn itself into a home zone, they should be allowed to etc.)

Lee: “If people choose to take up a hobby or something that means needing to cart around huge equipment (sailing perhaps, or horse riding, whatever), why should they be penalised for the only choice they can make?”

Er…because their free choice (they don’t have to go sailing or horse riding) has negative externalities – of course they should pay! Can I claim an allowance for my stamp collecting because it doesn’t pollute as much as a horsebox?

Mark: Thanks for sorting it out – I guess I was commeting too much. That maybe right I shall blog about this later perhaps.

And anon at 1.06: “Whether or not the party is proposing to set up a huge database, with details of everyone’s car journeys in it, is anything but a matter of detail.”

But that’s not the policy or the aim, that’s an aspect of the implementation of a policy. They should not have included that even if they wanted to give an outline of “how” they might implement road pricing. It is well beyond a “business case” or “policy” level and well into “systems analysis” and “implementation”.

Someone in our policy department perhaps needs to understand project management as well as political posing!

“Er…because their free choice (they don’t have to go sailing or horse riding) has negative externalities – of course they should pay! Can I claim an allowance for my stamp collecting because it doesn’t pollute as much as a horsebox?”

You’re missing the point, they *already* pay through higher fuel charges, and you’ve also ignored the greater point I was making which is that people that make that choice could be perfectly reasonable people that live the rest of their life with almost no carbon footprint. You victimise people that own large vehicles as if they as people are just wasting energy and emitting CO2 without considering how they as individual balance their lives and impact on the world.

Taxing people simply because they have a bigger vehicle without a much more inclusive taxation strategy that enables us to counter-balance high carbon usage in one aspect of life with low usage in another is simply illiberal, prejudicial and (worst of all) lazily implemented.

“Taxing people simply because they have a bigger vehicle without a much more inclusive taxation strategy that enables us to counter-balance high carbon usage in one aspect of life with low usage in another is simply illiberal, prejudicial and (worst of all) lazily implemented.”

I can see where your coming from but i simply dont want any governent to know if i personally had a burger or a fair-trade-vege falafel for lunch. nor be required to account for it. PCT ( Prodution Carbon Tax) levied on items and a reduction in VAT is whats needed there so that low C02 products are always cheaper than comparible items with high c02.

The mechanism by which road charges are to be collected is not merely an implementation detail. It is a critical aspect of the policy proposal.

Consider two hypothetical policies:

1. “We will charge people for road use, in a way that involves tracking the road movements of every vehicle in the country.”

2. “We will charge people for road use, in a way that does not involve tracking the road movements of every vehicle in the country.”

These are very different policies. Many people will be happy to support policy 2, but will vehemently oppose policy 1.

Asking people to sign up to policy 0, “We will charge people for road use”, without stating whether this will eventally turn into policy 1 or policy 2, will lead to strong opposition from those who fear policy 1.

Road use charging isn’t about reducing CO2 emissions (better tackled through fuel duty), it is about achieving a better allocation of road space. At the moment, road space is allocated on a first come, first served basis. Price incentives to shift journeys to less congested roads, or to less congested times, should help to reduce congestion. This is a worthwhile policy aim that is quite separate from reduction of CO2.

Tolls on conjested roads would be preferable to tracking ,which as you correctly postulate many pople are most opposed too.

Also a tracking system might be fairly easy to “accidentally” break or sabotage the signal with something sure hi-tech like wrapping it in tin foil….. and you can be sure thats the very first response criminals would have.

The most important, and urgent, thing is that Nick Clegg should be able to plausibly say to an interviewer “Our road charging scheme will not involve tracking individual car movements on the roads”.

That means having a credible outline scheme that deliver road charging but which does not, and cannot, record individual vehicle locations. Saying you’ll record these but store them separately, or destroy them, isn’t good enough: a malicious person or government could subvert that kind of system.

I sketched out one such system above – it has its flaws, and I’m sure it can be greatly improved upon, but it does achieve the fundamental policy requirement. A better scheme, thought out in more detail, that achieves the same thing would allow Liberal Democrats to rebut the “Big Brother” charge.

If we can’t do that, if we insist on vehicle tracking for road pricing, we will be widely accused of hypocrisy. We will seriously damage our attack on the database state. Every interview Nick Clegg tries to giv, on any topic, will be dogged by questioning on this issue by interviewers who scent blood. It will be a blunder with far-reaching consequences.

On alternate systems of road pricing: is it not good enough to simply have multiple congestion charge zones around the country, just how the London one works? I mean, London has a huge number of entry points, so for most town centres it would be a substantially easier task. And if this policy really is limiting us to dual carriageways / motorways then that is utterly retarded – most stop/start congestion is surely on single-lane roads approaching town/city centres?

” PCT ( Prodution Carbon Tax) levied on items and a reduction in VAT is whats needed there so that low C02 products are always cheaper than comparible items with high c02.”

generally I agree, as Josh would likely agree with, I don’t get in to the details of how…that’s for experts to discuss…but the “what” we need is a much more progressive idea that incorporates all aspects of carbon emissions…but not in a way that is constant taxation without rebate.

Trackers would also allow them to issue speeding tickets based on how far your car has gone over a certain time. Issue parking tickets based on where your car was stationary for an amount of time, All automatically as very little cost to the State by an unthinking machine it is impossible to reason or negotiate with.

If you think there using minor traffic offences as an alternate form of taxation now…………

What use would a privacy guarantee or robust legal protection of data be against successive governments? Not a lot. It wouldn’t take much before the police bagged the right to track terrorist suspects with the technology, and from there on, it’s slip, slip, slide…

Nick Clegg should take a stand against the ever-increasing culture of surveillance in the UK, rather than adding to it.

There is an individual vehicle tracking (not individual person tracking) system that works accross the country at the moment. It is a Norwich Union car insurance policy that charges you for miles driven rather than a flat rate per year. I commend it to those who like ecologically desirable price incentives, and to those who drive few miles.

As Iain Coleman says, there is also a non-tracking charging system available. For universal charging, I guess that one is likely to prove better value (even though it does not have GPS location thrown in) as well as better privacy.

Commenters who think road pricing is electoral poison forget that the primitive London system – which does not offer compensating cuts in petrol duty and Vehicle Excise Duty – proved pretty popular.

I’m not against the principle, but I agree with Jock that it does depend entirely on the details.

The ‘civil liberties’ line is not an excuse to react automatically against any proposal of this sort but an opportunity to clarify our rights and create means and methods to catch any abusers or intruders.

This is an electoral goldmine. The other parties can’t be trusted with our data and can’t be trusted to put sufficient or adequate controls on corporations or the state.

We can win this argument and thereby we can show we are to be trusted in government. Of course it is painful to go outside our comfort zone, but to do so demonstrates our foresight and our determination.

“The value of land rises as population grows and national necessities increase, not in proportion to the application of capital and labour, but through the development of the community itself. You have a form of value, therefore, which is conveniently called ‘site value,’ entirely independent of buildings and improvements and of other things which non-owners and occupiers have done to increase its value – a source of value created by the community, which the community is entitled to appropriate to itself. …In almost every aspect of our social and industrial problem you are brought back sooner or later to that fundamental fact.” [Mr. H.H. Asquith, at Paisley, 7th June 1923]

The legions of hauliers whining about fuel costs compared to the rest of Europe conveniently ignore the lines of toll booths across many of the continent’s motorways. Much as toll booths are low tech they do target long-distance journeys and push the cost/speed ratio in favour of other modes – ie you can avoid the tolls on local roads but it’ll take you a lot longer.

If the public is too squeamish to accept the technology then some form of toll boothing may be the only answer. I disagree that it’s not a green policy that way – on the contrary, reducing congestion and getting people out of cars onto trains or coaches IS reducing emissions – and charging people for road travel where they have no alternative is not going to reduce emissions – it’s just going to impoverish them.

A fair approach would be to tie individual road pricing schemes with public transport alternatives – for example halve trans-pennine rail fares, and double capacity, on the day you open toll booths on the M62.

Rail capacity in and out of London is a problem, but a fleet of subsidised express coaches (with dedicated lanes if necessary) could easily complement toll booths on the M1, A1 and other key roads, at least until the proposed high speed rail link is completed.

This policy ignores the weight of opinion at the consultation on transport policy in Liverpool. IMHO it is being adopted because the party is terrified of the impact of high fuel prices and duties on the rural vote and cannot think of alternatives.

It’s easy to make an elegant economic case for congestion charging, far more difficult to do it in practice. There’s a motorway toll in the West Midlands which has signally failed to relieve congestion in the region (although the toll is on the wrong bit of motorway of course. it should be on the urban section). On a national level toll booths will not work, especially in the age of the satnav where anybody can track down the nearest B road alternative. Again, talking of the West Midlands, they spent millions trying to design a workable scheme for the region without success. Satellite tracking promises to be more efficient but poses the two problems:
a) that of creating databases of individual movements;
b) the cost of implementation.
All this at a time when fuel prices are rising inexorably and most motorists are desperately casting round for alternatives. Economics also says that the price of carbon-based fuels will continue to rise in the medium to long run and as one poster said it is the price of fuel more than anything else that will push motorists to reduce consumption by all means possible.

Two cheers for a party that is being honest about the future cost of driving. But why don’t we really start talking about how rural communities will cope – indeed are coping – when fuel prices go through the roof?

‘Public’ transport ignores the fact that every company is profit-motivated.

If we can be clear about the real motivation behind corporate behaviour by increasing economic transparency and accountability we can make sure we make the best economic decisions.

This ties in with the simplest reason for pushing road pricing, which is to try to create price-comparability between different modes of transport so that consumers can make informed decisions about how best to get from A-to-B based on some real economic figures rather than some illusory sales pitch.

“There’s a motorway toll in the West Midlands which has signally failed to relieve congestion in the region”

Seems to do a pretty good job of preventing congestion on the road itself though! The whole tragedy of it is that the toll is marketed as a means to avoid the congestion on the free route.

Like I said, those using their SatNav to negotiate the free B-Road route will find themselves with a much longer journey; some will do it for sure, but I reckon most will either pay up or consider alternative modes.

Because travelling long distances on B-Roads is a bit like travelling long distances on local buses with a free pass – it’s cheap and kitsch, but slow and awkward. And suddenly you have to worry about the additional costs of overnight stays and more sustenance.

The public is so against hi-tech road pricing for now that I reckon toll booths are the only workable medium-term option. The issues with toll booths will ultimately pave the way for higher technology at a later stage.

It is necessary to explain more directly why the new Lib Dem road pricing policy is so ill thought through and just plain barmy.

First; the costs faced by the general voting public. Trains and track are expensive, but the majority of costs are covered by ticket revenues for each journey. Roads and traffic systems are expensive too but they are paid for (several times over) indirectly, by petroleum taxes, car tax, tax discs, and motoring/parking fines & charges. However, with increases in fuel economy and vehicle reliability, individual INCREMENTAL car journeys are much cheaper for car owners than trains, despite much higher fuel prices.

Part of the answer is to SHIFT road financing from taxation to usage, to create ‘fairer’ competition between rail and road for individual journeys – thus reducing car usage and emissions and increasing rail usage where there is capacity.

Higher fuel prices – especially in Europe – continue to generate improvements in vehicle fuel efficiency, and dampen increases in road usage. Even higher taxes will continue to do so.

Paying for the costs of road building & maintenance directly in practice means basic ‘entry and exit’ charges like motorway tolls and congestion charges – and new electronic systems in Singapore, Switzeland and elsewhere are very cost-effective (and can be easily ‘hypothecated’).

Cost per mile charges however, sever the link between the actual cost of roads and the revenues raised. In addition, when applied as a general policy, they are enormously expensive and complicated to administer. They require a vast electronic infrastructure, and systems of fines for non payment require number plate scanning technology as well as payment system technology, especially if complex exemption systems are proposed – as indeed the new Lib Dem policy proposes.

Due to the technology needed to implement it, cost per mile road pricing also provides for government a database of everyone’s whereabouts, which will make Labour advocates of the nanny state, and civil servants, salivate.

Promises of that such data will not be used by the State apparatus, are just laughable to anyone with a rudimentary grasp of recent history.

Most Lib Dems support with their heart and soul the Party’s courageous stand over the ‘surveillance society’, and Nick Clegg should be admired for his principled position. But this new cost per mile road pricing policy has, with great sadness I’m afraid, driven a coach & horses through our anti surveillance principles.

Civil servants and the lobbyists who persuaded our party on this one, will be celebrating a great victory. Our adoption of this broad cost per mile road pricing policy (as opposed to an entry and exit system and other feasible proposals) signals a terrible day for liberalism, but great day for the nanny state.

For the bureaucracy, excuses to extend the nanny state will always trump more important aims, like making the UK free of harmful emissions – an aim we are forgetting in the rush to punish the ‘population’ and in our willingness to be cajoled by slick lobbying from the electronic ‘surveillance’ and payment industry.

We need to focus more on non-statist innovations in public transport, and on leading the world in non-polluting private transport.

Only when we have more stringent deadlines for zero emissions than California, will I begin to feel we are doing our best. Paul

1. Detailed universal road pricing can be done without a massive, insecure and shaky data base. A scheme of the sort that Iain rightly commends above works through YOU having a sealed record of every charging point you have passed. That record generates your bill, the total of which is read automatically and remotely from time to time.

2. You can use that sealed record to appeal against a wrong bill.

3. If you really don’t want anyone to be able to find out where you have driven to ,you unseal the record and delete it after you have paid the latest bill. Then no record exists. (Putting in automatic record deletion X months after the automatic bill reading would be no problem.)

4. Proper flexible road pricing like this allows transferring many elements of motoring costs that are now overheads on to a per mile (or km.) basis – VED and insurance for starters. That discourages additional journeys.

5. Nobody is suggesting eliminating road fuel duty. It is a key incentive for introducing more fuel-efficient vehicles.The best policy against our motoring danaging other people (which happens through both congestion and climate change) is a combination of road pricing and fuel duties. However, what produces changes in car design is the international levels of fuel duty: there is not much point in keeping our levels well above the rest of Europe. We do better raising the rest through road pricing.

6. Proper road pricing can be introduced area by area, thus getting the bugs out of the system early. There is no calamitous disaster of a national switch-on day.

7. LibDem policy is better the longer you look at it. It happens that way in a lot of policy fields.

“5. Nobody is suggesting eliminating road fuel duty. It is a key incentive for introducing more fuel-efficient vehicles.The best policy against our motoring danaging other people (which happens through both congestion and climate change) is a combination of road pricing and fuel duties. However, what produces changes in car design is the international levels of fuel duty: there is not much point in keeping our levels well above the rest of Europe. We do better raising the rest through road pricing.”

But we are suggesting reducing fuel duty, which will reduce the incentives to pump up your tyres, drive carefully etc, as I outlined earlier. Furthermore, our fuel costs give an incentive to buy smaller and/or more economical cars, although clearly EU wide duty matters as well in terms of what manufacturers offer.

I have looked at this proposal for road pricing long and hard. It will be costly to implement compared with just having fuel duties (the London scheme eats a majority of the revenue in costs), and it will worsen global warming. I don’t find it looks any better for having looked at it longer, quite the reverse.

David Heigham’s comments are well-meaning but naive. Can you really entrust the implementation of a ‘sealed system’ to British civil servants ? One thing one learns in politics from experience is that in IMPLEMENTATION you have to assume the worst from the bureaucratic implementers, or face disaster. Wildly optimistic assumptions about the ability of civil servants to implement perfectly, without self interest, is Labour’s psychological flaw, not ours. Of course it is POSSIBLE to keep public information ‘sealed’, it is just very unlikely, and a cavalier risk to our liberties that MUST NOT be taken. . NHS IT systems, tax credits, child benefit, rail privatisation/subsidisation, polyclinics, detention-without-charge safeguards, you name it ! Well will we learn ? When will will we enter the real world and vacate our armchair ‘I’ve got a theory’ fantasties ? When will we grow up, finally ?

It is a scandal that Lib Dems have had our roasd pricing policy essentially established as a result of lobbying from fincincial consortia that stand to make billions, and who care not a jot about potential misuse of data and further erosion of civil liberties. Nick Clegg should be reprimanded for allowing this nonsense to slip through.

It seems the anti-camp have admitted defeat and are resorting to attacks on the messengers rather than concentrating on the message.

If we react dogmatically we’ll get left behind, so whatever we do propose we’ve just got to avoid all assumptions and ensure we are fully aware of every possible eventuality to be able to make a judgement about what is most desirable under the present circumstances.

I’d actually prefer my freedom of movement to be entirely free, but I know the best I can hope for is to pay the actual costs of travel, so I continueto fully support any measure to remove any market distortions between the different transport modes.

Database issues regarding private information can be resolved, but there’s still no price that can be fairly placed on exchanging my freedom of movement for our freedom of information without recognising, defining and enforcing the natural limits on both.

I’m a strong sceptic where databases and automatic enforcement are concerned – even the daddy of them, the DVLA database, is riddled with errors.

I’d have liked to have seen proposals for resolving the current “issues” with the Motor Insurance Database, and how the cars of insured drivers are regularly being seized on the spot (driver, children etc stranded) for not being on it. That seems to me to one where LD involvement could cause a change.

Matt, the issues you refer to don’t arise if the design is got right in the first place: you want to ensure that the horse doesn’t bolt, so you close the door behind you in case of just such an eventuality.

I was a civil servant. You are right that in implementation you should always guard against mis-use. My fellow officials are rather bad at seeing the possibilities that others with evil intentions may mis-use a system. It is therefore imperative that possibilities of mis-use are minimimsed. For road pricing that means leaving all the journey details in the car and never transmitting them to the charging system unless YOU choose to for a good reason at a particular moment. That is what I meant by “sealed”; sealed in the memory of your car’s automatic road price collecting unit, not circulating through a national system.

tim leunig

As yo uare probably aware, rising fuel duty (the Fuel Duty Escalator in thr jargon) was the most effective anti- climate change measure Britain has implemented(why Gordon Brown abandoned it is another story). But in the long run the major effects for reducing CO2 emissions from pricing up fuel work through the incentive to make vehicles more fuel efficient. The other effects, apart from discouraging journeys, are secondary. Road pricing discourages journeys just as well as fuel duties, and in a more discriminating way.

While disliking this proposal, I would just make two points. First, for rural dwellers like me road pricing could actually be a benefit, as we are likely to be charged very little as our roads are (comparatively) uncongested, while high fuel costs hit us hard. Second, when (hopefully not if) we get cars that use very little fuel (100mpg is technically easily feasible) and/or cars are powered by renewables-generated fuels, the problem will not be one of emissions but of congestion and fuel taxes may then not be the best route to go.

I know an awful lot about this subject but if I told you why I would have to kill you. I have a huge degree of sympathy for the civil liberties arguments on here but I am afraid you are all way too late and way too naive. If you were to travel say from a suburb of London to a suburb of Leeds by car, you would be caught by dozens of ANPR cameras (automatic number plate recognition). Every police force would know instantly when you entered their area and when you left. Your number plate is flagged up and checked with DVLA for tax disc and insurance and if the police want to track you they can put a marker on your car and that is flagged also. This system is operational now and was used to track the cars of the 7/11 bombers (after the event) so they knew their entire movements for days beforehand.

This policy seems to be a copy of the existing DfT proposal and is therefore not about the environment but about demand management.At current rates of traffic growth the strategic road network (motorways and trunk roads) will have major areas of congestion that will mean almost stationary trafic for long periods of the day. There are 2 ways to deal with this, build more roads or manage demand by pricing. Therefore the SW section of the M25 at 8 am Monday to Friday would be the most expensive road on the network. Other bits of the network would be free.
As an “expert” in this field I am v conflicted about its introduction. I will ignore the civil liberties arguments as that horse has bolted already. In terms of whether we manage demand by congestion or pricing, I see the former as unacceptable for UK plc but see the latter as incredibly difficult to manage administratively. Whichever option is used we need to have far more imaginative public transport solutions to give people alternatives.

“I will ignore the civil liberties arguments as that horse has bolted already. ”

Then what’s the point in even being a Liberal any more? not for you, I mean, for me. If fighting against government surveillance is a lost cause then I might as well hang up my keyboard and go live in a tree on some island somewhere.

John D: there are not just two ways to deal with the problem: there is a third, which is leave it to the ‘market’. The fact that there is congestion on a particular road at a particular time is a function of hundreds or thousands of individual decisions. Human beings are highly adaptable and therefore so is the free market: individuals are deciding whether it is worth their while to travel on a piece of road at a particular time bearing in mind the amount of congestion they may encounter, the cost in fuel, and whether they will be able to arrive at their destination at a satisfactory time. If the cost seems worth it, then what is the problem? If it doesn’t then the individual has to find an alternative solution.

Matt, I find it quite eay to agree with quite a lot of what Mr Blair said, so I won’t take that as an insult.

His words were fine and he did have an effective style of oratory, unfortunately his actions became increasingly divergent from his words: do you remember “we will not introduce top-up fees and have legislated to prevent them”?

I understand the motivation behind the precautionary principle, but that shouldn’t lead to anyone to sit on their hands to avoid taking action, it should force us to get the design right before we introduce it (though political reality means this is rarely the case).

Both the problems you raise are consequences of flaws in the design process which led to flaws in the design (or lack thereof) in the system.

re John D and civil liberties: a notoriously brutal kidnap/rape/murder case from my area was solved by the ANPR system tracking a suspected vehicle within 30 minutes of the report being filed so I can recognise the applications. I still think however that it is important to make the distinction between dual-carriage highways and the universally accessible streets and by-ways which we live on and walk down, elsewise are we going to start charging pedestrians and cyclists?

“there are not just two ways to deal with the problem: there is a third, which is leave it to the ‘market’. The fact that there is congestion on a particular road at a particular time is a function of hundreds or thousands of individual decisions.”

But the proposed policy is presented primarily as a means of reducing carbon emissions. Clearly “leaving it to the market” isn’t going to achieve that.

Of course, it’s very questionable whether the answer is to reduce fuel tax and replace it with road-pricing for selected journeys!

“f you were to travel say from a suburb of London to a suburb of Leeds by car, you would be caught by dozens of ANPR cameras (automatic number plate recognition). Every police force would know instantly when you entered their area and when you left.”

I personally don’t have a problem with the database society as I believe that with proper safeguards and policies there is no reason for our information to become dangerous to us. What I have a problem with is the people administering it that seem unable to do so effectively. We can sit here with our situation at the moment and STILL argue against more pervasion of this type of system through our society because there is no “door” to close.

The whole database issue is a river that is growing. Yes, we have to live with the river as it stands, but that doesn’t mean we can’t build defenses to hold the river back, or even to go back up stream and make measures to alleviate it’s threat. I guess what I’m trying to say is that the argument that “we’re already tracked” is both not a new argument, nor is it one that stands in direct contradiction to people asking to not be tracked/recorded any further.

But this whole issue has got off base, the problem with this idea is not the privacy issue (though that is a part of it), it’s that the Lib Dems are abandoning the tradition of being the party to actually think its policies through and to start becoming one that throws out headlines it thinks people want to hear..in this case more taxation on polluting nasty cars without any kind of policy idea for improving public transport.

“But the proposed policy is presented primarily as a means of reducing carbon emissions.”

No, it’s not. If it was for reducing carbon emissions it wouldn’t be trying to force people off of the shortest and most fuel efficient routes even when there is traditionally no congestion on them (outside of rush hours). This policy intends to cash in on convenient travel while aimlessly hoping to tackle congestion.

Let me see. Massively complex computer system that needs to monitor the location of all cars and lorries (and by implication normally their owners), with a Lib Dem guarantee of privacy. We may believe that privacy needs protecting, but New Authoritarian Labour, Old Authoritarian Conservatives and the Home Office, the secret service etc, etc? Remember Local Authorities using legislation intended for fighting terrorism, to determine whether a family lived in a particular schools catchment area.

I wonder if we really ever think through how our pronouncements can be misused by non-liberals. Which bit of “safeguard a free, fair and open society … fundamental values of liberty” don’t we understand?

Perhaps someone can explain how CO2 can be a pollutant when the Dutch use enhanced CO2 at levels of 1200ppm or more to get higher and faster growth levels in their glass houses, normal levels are 380ppm.
Perhaps someone can show a link between rising CO2 levels and temperature, global temperature stopped rising in 1998 while CO2 carried on increasing, Co2 does not drive temperature and is not a pollutant.
Don`t be conned, go on the net and type (Global warming skeptic) and learn the truth.

Not a chemistry specialist, but the relative density of CO2 molecules means it stores greater energy compared to the average atmospheric composition at similar pressures. Within the range of the process the rate of photosynthesis varies according to the relative values of sunlight, temperature and chemical and nutrient availability.

Further to this different plants manage the process slightly differently with infinite variation in the by-products.

Our friend Bob, above, seems to have a seen a definitve set of facts but has failed to understand how this knowledge can be applied to different situations with different effects.

Pollution is like weeds, in that both are perfectly normal things which happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong to the wrong effect for our purposes.

What is being missed here is the vast cost of running a road pricing system. You would need to double VED and fuel tax just to pay for the technology and administration so it is ridiculous to suggest taxes could be reduced to compensate for the journey costs.

The people pushing this and arguing for its introduction are big business who will make fortunes from it. The end user i.e. the driver will never see any benefit; only huge increases in cost which go directly to the private companies like Capita who will run the scheme.

London is a good template – nearly all the £1.2Billion in charges has gone in running the scheme. Why repeat such a dreadful mistake?

A massive, enormously complex computer system. Can you imagine the fun consultants would have in interpreting “2.4.17 We envisage that our motorway and trunk road user charging scheme would operate using the ‘tag and beacon’ scheme, covering motorways and trunk roads. To avoid a plague of ‘rat running’, the technology chosen must allow for penalties to be enforced on drivers who ‘rat run’ in order to avoid payment” as one example.

Barmpot nanny statism dressed in green clothing that will do nothing but get up the noses of motorists and hand great swathes of rural England to the Conservatives on a silver platter. Just crazy. Was this policy written using Norman Baker’s special green ink?

We need a decent transport system and inter urban roads are a central part of that. We need to pay for their upkeep and a road-user charge is a good way to do it. You do not need to to have a spy in the sky, the government does not need to know who or where you are. All you need is for the vehicle to know where it is and it can work out how much it should pay. It collects the fee from a local nominated mobile telephone. The technogy in done and dusted. The rate to charge in most areas and for most vehicles would be to low to bother colecting (most roads most of the time around a penny a mile). Don’t do it on CO2 use fuel tax for that. Use it for raod damage and congestion. For more http://www.eta.co.uk/blog

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